RICH CHOCOLATE CAKE

Two years ago, I shared a post about grooms and groom's cakes, dedicating a recipe to each of the characters who married their sweethearts in Jane Austen's Emma. Although wedding cakes for both partners had been a trend during the Middle Ages, the Regency era was more focused on bride's version -a sponge cake filled with raisins, candied fruit peel & nuts and topped with sugar icing. Groom's cakes were re-introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century. Victorian recipes included fruits soaked in alcohol but in the years that followed, chocolate became a must.

 

A young lady of the Regency era with her beaux - John Pettie, 1882

Having proposed five different cakes for Emma's grooms (M. Knightley, Robert Martin, M. Weston, M. Elton, and Frank Churchill), I shouldn't be prattling about groom's cake today. But there are lots of characters in Jane Austen's novels deserving a groom's cake that is loaded with flavor: molasses, sugar, honey, butter, chocolate, vanilla, and dark rum. Historically, the development of British and European culinary habits and traditions did not occur until the 17th century, when tea and sugar and molasses and spices and rum became available not only to nobility but also to middle class. None of the gingerbreads featured in Hannah Glasse's or Elizabeth Raffald's best-selling works could have been realized without the labor of slaves. This was a generally accepted fact in Jane Austen's world although her private thoughts on colonization (or imperialism) might not have been different from ours. Still, many of the retired officers and landowners in her books profit without remorse from the imperial policies. In Mansfield park and the unfinished manuscript of Sanditon, there are entire families that live off their estates or trade across the seas.

 

 

RICH CHOCOLATE CAKE

Lightly warm 100g molasses, 100g brown sugar, 100g honey, 100g butter, 100g plain chocolate, 150g whole milk, and 200g sultana raisins in a cooking pot. Leave to stand for a while, then add 100ml dark rum and mix well. Sift 400g rye flour with 1tsp vanilla sugar, 1tbsp baking powder and 1tsp soda. Combine the mixtures, knead very lightly, place the dough in a medium-sized round baking dish and bake in a moderate oven for just under an hour. To avoid burning, cover with aluminum foil after 45 minutes. Upturn the bread on a wire rack and leave to stand. Make a glaze with 50g plain chocolate, 2tbsp brown sugar, and 1-2tbsp whole milk that you will heat in a double-boiler, then spread on the upturned cake with a knife.

This recipe is good enough for a king, or a wedding. Despite the anachronism, I'd like to think of it as groom's cake in Mansfield's Park after Thomas Bertram Jr.'s change of heart about family and politics or at the wedding that never happens between Charlotte and Sidney Parker in the unfinished novel called Sanditon. (It could also grace the feast of Susan Vernon, who marries idiot Sir James to conceal her illegitimate pregnancy. In the filmed version of Lady Susan, Jane Austen's early novella, the heroine's best friend is from Baltimore, too.)